After a few months of research, it became clear that there wasn’t a one-stop-shop type brand in Australia that sold affordable products which would make a difference in women’s lives. “There were expensive brands out of Europe for skincare and cosmetics, and there were cheap brands out of Asia.” Maakrun launched Sasy n Savy as a skincare and aromatherapy company pitched somewhere in between. The name combines two aspects of her personality. “Women are sassy and they’re also savvy. They’re beautiful, they’ve got flair, they’ve got passion. They get what they want, they know what they want and they go out and get it.” Which is exactly what Maakrun herself has done.

The Asian opportunity

Starting with just her own savings and a small loan from her mother and sister, Maakrun began developing essential oils and aromatherapy from native Australian plants, launching the brand at the Mind, Body, Spirit expo in 2004. A week later, the brand was on shelves in Hong Kong. “We picked up a Hong Kong distributor and started developing the Asian market. We spent a couple of years just travelling around the Asian market, knocking on clients’ doors, presenting what we had.” Over the years, Sasy n Savy has developed a range of skincare products to complement the aromatherapy range, and Maakrun expects that will continue to grow.

The brand now sells in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan, but Maakrun says Sasy n Savy’s Asian success didn’t happen overnight. “We’re constantly visiting, doing expos, seeing visitors and seeing what their demands are.” Sasy n Savy now has a Hong Kong office. “Because if you’re not there, a competitor will come along. There’s no brand loyalty because retailers want high profit margins and high turnover. You need to have an actual physical presence in the market for the longevity of the brand.”

Australian products are popular in Asia because they are perceived to be clean and green, Maakrun says. Realising Australia has strict research and development procedures and high quality ingredients, some Asian brands actually get Australian companies to manufacture for them, under their brand. “Big brands have been using our ingredients for a very long time. We import the end products back in and pay 20 times the price,” she adds.

The Australian edge

The ‘Australianness’ of the brand is its unique selling point, Maakrun explains. “We use Kakadu Plum, which is the world’s most vitamin C rich fruit. It stimulates skin cells and collagen. We use wild rosella and grass lily. Those ingredients will create the vitamins, antioxidants and nutrients for your skin’s daily intake.” While the ingredients may be unfamiliar to an international audience, customers understand the value of Australian natives. The brand has been using the ‘Australian Made’ logo from the beginning, and Maakrun wants to do more to capitalise on the popularity of Australian products. “We’re changing our packaging to slap ‘Made in Australia’ right across everything.”

Following its success in Asia, Sasy n Savy looked for a distributor in the Middle East (“it took three goes to get the right person”) and now sells throughout Europe. “Overseas, you’re competing against the top notch European brands that sit beside us on the shelf at Harrods. But people travel. The UK market is full of Asian and Arabic buyers, and it helps that we have a presence in Asia and the Middle East. People know the brand, that it’s from Australia and all that.”

Maakrun is determined to keep Sasy n Savy’s manufacturing in Australia. “There’s not many of us left. My aim is to still say Australian made, Australian owned.” But disappointingly, selling in Australia has been a difficult path. Many Australian retailers don’t have any confidence in Australian brands, Maakrun says. “A lot of retailers will only take on the big brands with the big marketing dollar. They want products to hit the shelf and walk back out again.” It’s starting to change, but many companies find it more profitable to invest in developing sales outside the Australian market. “We were doing expos, we were advertising in magazines, we had the website presence, we were doing seminars, newsletters, fax outs, everything; but at the end of the day the investment compared to the return wasn’t to be seen compared to the international market.”

Finding a way to finance Australian product development has been key to the brand’s success on a business level. This came in the form of private label manufacturing. After seeing Sasy n Savy products in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong, the Marriott hotel in Sydney approached Maakrun and suggested private label. One deal begets another, and now Sasy n Savy does private label manufacturing for a number of 5-star hotels in Australia and internationally. “The R&D for product development is extremely expensive, trying to get products right, testing back and forth,” Maakrun explains. “I’m not an expert so we have to consult that part out of our business.” Despite never advertising private label manufacturing, the profits now pay for product development.

Highs and lows

Manufacturing is a consistent challenge, Maakrun says. “”Every day is a different day. It’s non-stop, go-go. Nothing stays the same: regulations are changing, laws are changing, aromas are changing. Different countries like different aromas and different colours.” Finding and maintaining relationships with distributors can be extremely difficult, Maakrun warns. “You don’t always know who to trust and who’s ethical and professional and who’s not.” Distributors come and go, so you need to have a firm market presence in the country that isn’t reliant on that contract. “Then you’ve got a firmer hold on the country and more activity in the market.”

After nearly a decade of export triumphs and the odd mistake, the 37-year-old entrepreneur has learned it is vital to do your research and understand your market if you plan to trade internationally. “Understand your customers and your competitors, and make sure there’s a good profit margin in it. Be passionate and just go for it.”

Immensely proud of the work the brand has achieved to date, Maakrun says customer feedback remains her guide for measuring success. “People start to say my skin’s feeling firmer, tighter, nourished. You get a lot of good feedback from our products.”  Most importantly, the Sasy n Savy team of 12 have travelled the world and had fun growing the brand. “We’ve enjoyed our life. Which is one of our trademarks: Live, Inspire, Feel Good and Empower. We’ve managed to do that by developing these products for our lifestyle.”

“There is a great deal of knowledge transfer within the Olympic movement and from one Games to the next. Given the success of Sydney 2000, it was not surprising therefore that the Sydney Games were seen by the London Organising Committee (LOCOG) as the gold standard,” explains Kym Fullgrabe, senior trade commissioner for the UK and Israel.

Although we set the standard, it did not mean that Australian companies were automatic contenders for London contracts. Instead, LOCOG looked for leading capability worldwide and Australian suppliers had to compete against any supplier operating in the UK, he says. Because the £7.3 billion construction budget came from taxpayers’ money, the procurement process followed European Union rules, designed to ensure free competition on major European public sector projects.

“This process was open to Australian suppliers, but bidders for the tier one construction projects had to demonstrate established integration with existing UK and European supply chains,” says Fullgrabe. The upshot was that existing exporters to the UK and Europe had a better chance of competing than new exporters, unless those newer players could piggyback in as subcontractors of the established companies.

Major Australian companies contributing to the Games include Lend Lease, project manager for the construction of the Athlete’s Village, SKM, engineering temporary structures such as the basketball arena, and Populous, with a sports architecture team in the consortium awarded the contract to design and build the main Olympic stadium, as well as smaller architectural services.

Beyond building

Although the construction budget is the major part of the money being spent on the Games, there are other areas where Australian exporters will contribute, including the delivery of the Games via specialised event staging and management, says Fullgrabe. “A recent example of a major success would be the contract for cleaning and waste recycling for the main Olympic venues, awarded to the UK subsidiary of [Australian company] Cleanevent.”

Outside of, but related to, the Games is urban redevelopment. LOCOG established the 2012 Olympic venue in London’s East End, a deprived area of the city, as part of an effort to rejuvenate the surrounds. As a result, investment such as Westfield’s $2 billion retail development in Stratford has become a key part of the East End’s urban renewal.

Most of the big ticket tenders for the Games have already been decided, but at one year out there are a few smaller opportunities that Australian exporters may want to look into using LOCOG’s CompeteFor process.

Fullgrabe says those businesses that missed out should still be able to use the 2012 London Olympic Games as a leverage point for similar events. “The focus now is to use their experience to win business with the many major sports events around the world. This includes Rio 2016, Toronto 2015 Pan American Games, Sochi 2014, Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games and many more,” he lists. “Organising committee members from all of these events, as well as all the bidding teams for the next round of major events, will be in London during the Games making it a cost effective place to promote Games related services.”

Olympic impact

The Games have been a turning point for the UK economy, says Richard Morris, the British Consul General for Sydney and Director General of UK Trade and Investment Australasia. Since winning the bid more than six years ago—from rival city Paris and A-list competitor New York, no less—London has survived a terrorist attack, the GFC, and sweeping political change.

Throughout, the Games have remained a beacon of hope, and the excitement is already beginning to build. “They are hugely important to the UK and people are thrilled that we’ve won it,” says Morris. “Over the last 12 months people have started to get more excited. Ticket sales have gone out so some people now know where they’re going to be.”

It’s a future that Sydney company Laservision couldn’t have anticipated when it started out doing laser shows in nightclubs in the 1980s. “CEO Paul McCloskey was a pioneer,” says Shannon Brooks, director of projects and marketing. “Lasers were being used in medical research, but he really harnessed laser power for use in entertainment for the first time.” The company now has 21 permanent employees and operates light installations all over the world.

International innovation

Driving innovation through the company’s dedicated research and development facility at Dural in Sydney’s north-west, Laservision keeps ahead of the technology curve. During the early 1990s, the company began orchestrating laser billboards and light shows for special events. As shows incorporated more and more multimedia, it became clear technology wasn’t keeping up.

“Traditionally when you go to an attraction, you’ve got all these third-party controllers that talk all these different languages (controlling different types of lights, for example),” Brooks explains. “We designed a show control system capable of integrating all of these different mediums on the one server. We have one protocol, which keeps everything in sync. It’s talking across all the different mediums at the same time.” Even more impressive, the controls can be operated from the Dural facility. Brooks can stop and start the Hong Kong light show from a rural Sydney suburb.

The technology development, funded by the Australian Government, put Laservision ahead of its competitors in terms of the ability to design and implement large-scale complex permanent attractions. “The technology we have is scalable. We’re unlimited in terms of how large our shows can be.” The recently opened “Wonder Full” installation at the Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore is a 360-degree extravaganza over the 40-acre property. Fourteen ‘universes’ containing 512 lighting channels are required to operate the show.

“Winning the Marina Bay Sands contract was a proud moment because the Las Vegas Sands corporation singled us out.” Identifying Laservision as a contender with 13 other world competitors, the Sands corporation audited the Laservision business for 18 months. “It’s not often the United States will look outside itself to provide a solution. But we were identified as the right choice for them,” Brooks says.

Laservision does most of its work overseas, with a permanent presence in Hong Kong and Singapore and projects lined up in Russia, India and Pakistan. “Every single week we get inquiries from different exotic parts of the world, from Iran, from Qatar.” The majority of inquiries come from South East Asia, so the company focuses on that region as a core market, with offices in Singapore and Hong Kong. “Lots of those countries look to areas like Australia because they know we’ve got a high grasp of technology and we’ve got the skills.” Austrade’s backing has helped immensely in securing contracts. “They were instrumental in facilitating the talks with Samsung for our first installation in Everland in Korea. We’d never done international business on that scale before.”

Laservision’s first major international installation was the Hong Kong Symphony of Lights, commissioned by the Hong Kong Tourism Board to boost visitor numbers after the 2002 SARS epidemic brought tourist numbers to an all time low. “We had a study done,” Brooks said. “The Symphony of Lights increased the average nightly stay in Hong Kong by 1.8 nights. You can image what that did for tourism sector.”

About 90 percent of Laservision’s business comes through its website, Brooks says, due to months of optimisation work. “We don’t do any active marketing.” While industry best practice is usually to tender for big installations, Brooks says Laservision is often approached for advice on developing the tender. “We have a bit of a unique advantage then.”

After a few months of research, it became clear that there wasn’t a one-stop-shop type brand in Australia that sold affordable products which would make a difference in women’s lives. “There were expensive brands out of Europe for skincare and cosmetics, and there were cheap brands out of Asia.” Maakrun launched Sasy n Savy as a skincare and aromatherapy company pitched somewhere in between. The name combines two aspects of her personality. “Women are sassy and they’re also savvy. They’re beautiful, they’ve got flair, they’ve got passion. They get what they want, they know what they want and they go out and get it.” Which is exactly what Maakrun herself has done.

The Asian opportunity

Starting with just her own savings and a small loan from her mother and sister, Maakrun began developing essential oils and aromatherapy from native Australian plants, launching the brand at the Mind, Body, Spirit expo in 2004. A week later, the brand was on shelves in Hong Kong. “We picked up a Hong Kong distributor and started developing the Asian market. We spent a couple of years just travelling around the Asian market, knocking on clients’ doors, presenting what we had.” Over the years, Sasy n Savy has developed a range of skincare products to complement the aromatherapy range, and Maakrun expects that will continue to grow.

The brand now sells in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan, but Maakrun says Sasy n Savy’s Asian success didn’t happen overnight. “We’re constantly visiting, doing expos, seeing visitors and seeing what their demands are.” Sasy n Savy now has a Hong Kong office. “Because if you’re not there, a competitor will come along. There’s no brand loyalty because retailers want high profit margins and high turnover. You need to have an actual physical presence in the market for the longevity of the brand.”

Australian products are popular in Asia because they are perceived to be clean and green, Maakrun says. Realising Australia has strict research and development procedures and high quality ingredients, some Asian brands actually get Australian companies to manufacture for them, under their brand. “Big brands have been using our ingredients for a very long time. We import the end products back in and pay 20 times the price,” she adds.

The Australian edge

The ‘Australianness’ of the brand is its unique selling point, Maakrun explains. “We use Kakadu Plum, which is the world’s most vitamin C rich fruit. It stimulates skin cells and collagen. We use wild rosella and grass lily. Those ingredients will create the vitamins, antioxidants and nutrients for your skin’s daily intake.” While the ingredients may be unfamiliar to an international audience, customers understand the value of Australian natives. The brand has been using the ‘Australian Made’ logo from the beginning, and Maakrun wants to do more to capitalise on the popularity of Australian products. “We’re changing our packaging to slap ‘Made in Australia’ right across everything.”

Your website can even form the initial part of your sales cycle, Ballard advises. “This will not only save you time and money but will qualify and quantify your relationships in international markets.” If you have appropriate products, a website with an inbuilt virtual storefront can do the whole job for you.

Most importantly, don’t put all of your money into building a ‘set-and-forget’ site, where nothing changes from month to month. Building a great website is just the beginning, Bullas says. “You need to live on a social web now. You need to start publishing regular content and educate your customers on your website.” This is where the real work begins. Your website needs a space for dynamic content, e.g. a blog. “A blog is a place where you actually get feedback from your customers. Which gives you direction on what you should be doing with your products or services.” Your number one priority is to start capturing emails, Bullas advises. “That gives you the ability to communicate instantly and send out a newsletter.”

Social media strategy

Give your website ‘wings’ by using social media. “One in 12 people are on Facebook. It’s an ecosystem where everyone is hanging out,” Bullas says. “You need to be fishing where the fish are, and the fish are on social media.” Treat your website as a ‘hub’, where all of your content goes. Then use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube as your ‘outposts’, where you can share relevant and interesting content. “Using social media is like putting your marketing on steroids, because you share once to many and then many share to many.”

Social media is a highly leveraged platform to get content out globally very quickly, and it’s a vital part of any web marketing strategy, he adds.  Don’t dismiss it because its origins were superficial. “Facebook was about dating girls, YouTube was about recording a dinner party, they developed around people’s personal lives. But they’re evolved into something much more powerful, and they have now become a serious business and marketing tool.”

[Continued]

“Our offices were always in these ‘warehousey’ spaces,” Chu says. “We’re a small company, we didn’t have big resources, so we always shared these larger spaces with other companies.” In 2006, Anken group was born. The Enclave team sought out a warehouse and designed a retro-fit to incorporate sustainable features and recycled materials. Anken now leases office space in four retro-fitted buildings to creative businesses that need flexible workspaces at budget prices. “It’s something a little bit unique, it’s not your typical grey day corporate offices. It tends to attract more creative style businesses, advertising, architecture, design.”

The Anken Group leases anything from one desk to whole floors depending on what a tenant needs at any one time. It also offers receptionists, internet access and printing facilities. “Basically, we provide resources so that they individually don’t have to put up a lot of startup capital when they come here.” Chu says it’s become a really vibrant community. “Lots of our tenants actually do business with each other.”

Chu says Anken does face competition, but it comes mostly from state-owned companies. “Because we’ve come from a small business background and we are a creative company, we understand much better than those large companies. We understand the market. It’s not just design, it’s about services, flexibility in the contracts, it’s everything!”

The two businesses are complementary, Chu says, and she hopes they will merge in the future. While Enclave has faced the learning curve of dealing with Chinese developers and Chinese clients—“the cultural differences of doing business in China”—the Anken group has had it easier with a client base made up mostly of ex-patriates. The business attracts foreign clients because Anken has an understanding of the challenges involved in starting up creative businesses in China. “It is actually really tough.”

While there’s a big push in China towards the kind of ‘new urbanism’ that Enclave champions, Chu says the government frequently announces broad sweeping projects that don’t necessarily get implemented. She saw Anken Green as a small way Enclave could put its design philosophy into practise. “This part of the city was kind of run-down. To be able to turn a part of a city into something more active and vibrant, that’s a fantastic triumph in two or three years.”

The Anken Group won the Sustainability and People’s Choice awards in the Australia-China Business Awards in 2010. Chu said the accolades confirm Anken is going in the right direction. “For the Australian business community to recognise us in the category we really care about is a big encouragement.”

As construction in China takes off, architecture is booming, but Chu says that means global international corporations are squeezing smaller companies out. “In order to sustain a creative market, I think the government will have to do something to support smaller businesses.” The successful businesswoman isn’t worried about her own businesses, saying they are well established in the market. “We’ll just keep doing our own style of sustainable design and management. I think there’s a really big market.”

As other cities in China mature, Chu will set her sights beyond Shanghai, maybe even as far as home. “I’d love to do a project in Melbourne.”

“We know that consumers spend as much time consuming content on devices other than their TV screen or magazines so it’s really important that if you’re going to talk to them you actually talk to them on all the places that they hang out.”

It’s a brand-new arena and that means marketing boils down to educating potential clients, she explains. “People don’t understand what digital media does, the need for it and the real benefit that a solid digital strategy can give you when you start talking about engaging consumers.”

Operating in Australia since 2005, The Project Factory is engaged in producing online documentaries, locative mobile, Facebook and 3-D games, and coming up with new ways for people to interact through digital media. It opened its first international office in the United Kingdom early this year, with former Lion Television Head of Interactive Kirsty Hunter in charge. Hunter believes the advent of connected television, explosion of the apps market and continued popularity of games means that the timing is perfect for a digital production specialist to launch in the UK market.

“Digital media is a lot more widely adopted in the broadcast industry in the UK and Europe then it is here in Australia. In the UK, they get it,” Wilson says. She says the UK is a market of specialists so The Project Factory’s key differentiator is their approach of targeting ‘one consumer’. “We ask, ‘How do you talk to that one consumer across all of the places they go?’”

Online visibility is what distinguishes successful internet ventures from failures and underachievers. Even companies that invest thousands of dollars in sophisticated websites struggle to connect with their target audience because they are unaware they even exist.

If you type your business name into the top three Australian search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!7) and your business name does not appear on the first page you need to do some serious work on improving your online visibility to help your customers find you.

Here are some methods to help you increase your exposure online.

1. Include related keywords
Search engines look at the keywords and phrases included in your website copy to assess what your site is about. You need to determine what your key words are and what words people type into a search engine when looking for a business like yours and make sure these are incorporated throughout your website.

These keywords need to be included into the page title, meta tags, page description and then repeated two or three times in the copy on the page. It is a good idea to use a different key word or phrase in each page of your site. By using a range of relevant keywords you should see an increase in traffic from search engines.

2. Update your website frequently
Search engines like websites that have fresh items, they do not like outdated static websites. Each time you add content to your site you improve the ranking of your site in the search engines.

It is a good idea to add new content to your site each week. This can be articles, industry news, customer profiles, case studies or videos about your products or services.  Adding a blog to your website can help make the updating process easier. A blog not only provides fresh information but provides your visitors with an opportunity to interact with your business.

The benefits sound enticing. E-commerce provides smaller enterprises access to wider markets. Services can be delivered electronically or in some cases exporters can use third parties to deliver the goods to their overseas customers. They can run their operation from home, and that’s exactly how some of Australia’s internet export success stories started out.

David Brown’s Trixan online store was a finalist in the 2010 NSW Export Awards. The entrepreneur launched his business from a home office 10 years ago. He now employs 50 staff and sells 40,000 products across 100 brands to overseas buyers in the United States and United Kingdom.

Brown says, “We wanted to set up an infrastructure that would enable us to sell various types of product from any jurisdiction, including split orders from multiple warehouses anywhere around the world and being fulfilled anywhere around the world.”

The fulfillment model

“For many companies fulfillment warehouses provide a great way to ‘outsource’ their logistics arm, without giving up control over their own sales and marketing efforts,” says Kylie Hargreaves, executive director with the New South Wales Department of Trade and Investment, Regional Infrastructure and Services.

“Many exporters may be familiar with the old concept of pick ’n pack warehouses. Fulfillment warehouses are pretty much a more sophisticated version of this old concept,” she explains. “Depending on the provider and the market, you can get support services basically from the point of entry into the market to the point of product return. So that means assistance with customs clearance, storage of inventory in their warehouses (often in bonded facilities), inventory management, pick ‘n pack services, tracking and fulfilment of customer orders, issuing of shipping confirmations to customers, management of 1800 type client service numbers and return services, as well as basic banking services.”

She says the fulfillment modeal can cut out several steps in a normal distribution channel, which can otherwise cut into your profit margins. “You can pick the full range of support services or just a few, you can scale up or down easily with demand, you can ensure someone else provides in-market support to customers who have placed orders, all while you focus on building up your sales and marketing efforts.”

Brown’s choice of pet products was purely opportunistic, he says, chosen because of the competitive advantages the sector offered at the time that allowed him to radically undercut retail prices. Since then he has added swimwear and intimate apparel under the brand name Trixan Body and has just completed regulatory and licensing certification requirements to operate a mail order pharmacy in the US.

He says implementing the organisational infrastructure to enable taking on multiple suppliers of hundreds of SKUs (stock keeping units) and monitoring their availability involved “a lot of pain”. Early on he dumped the company’s existing operational systems in favour of a new infrastructure that would be scaleable for virtually unlimited future growth. “We have Fortune 500-grade systems that can expand from business that is currently tens of millions to tens of billions.”

The system covers operational procedures, workflow, stock management and tagged data management that assists in getting a product ‘live’ onto the website and took two years to implement but Brown says it has been worth it. “Companies have audited our whole warehouse and operational model and they’re prepared to back us because they can see we’re doing it more professionally than most.”

Technology writer, broadcaster and Netsmarts CEO Paul Wallbank says that moving into e-commerce changes the nature of how a company operates. “You go from being a manufacturing manager or HR manager to becoming a project manager. With the lean manufacturing model where you’re buying in those services internationally you have to manage your partners overseas.”

He says spot buying on the basis of cost is a false economy. “The cheaper you go the more you’ll have to manage, which is counter-intuitive because you’re trying to reduce your costs and your management time. It also can leave purchasers exposed if there’s a shortage or change in the labour market. “We’re seeing that at the moment with some of the US manufacturers who are finding Chinese labour rates are starting to climb.”

While the growth potential for an e-commerce enterprise is unlimited, Wallbank says logistics, finance and management time are important factors. “If you don’t have the team to manage that growth you’re really going to struggle. You’ve got to ask yourself where are the bottlenecks in your supply chain and management structure.”

What started as a handbag endeavour has escalated into an international phenomenon. Today the brand is also known for its statement jewellery, modern headpieces and online range of shoes.

The Sydney-based design studio is one of Australia leading labels and is stocked in over 800 stores globally. Cates says the brand is fast becoming an editor’s favourite, regularly appearing on the pages of fashion magazines, and is snapped up in stores by celebrities such as US singer Kelly Rowland.

Noticing that Urban Originals was featuring on blogs as far afield as Tokyo and Los Angeles prompted her to develop the brand’s own in-house blog, providing behind the scenes insights and reporting on trends and emerging fashion and arts talents, in order to spread the international buzz farther. She also applied for EMDG funding to help her attend trade shows in her target markets.

“The Export Markets Development Grants scheme has been wonderful for Urban Originals, “ she says. “It has assisted the company in showing at some of the world’s best fashion trade shows, including London Fashion Week, Bread and Butter in Berlin and Magic in Vegas.”

Cates used an export grants consultant which she says has made the EDMG application process reasonably smooth and credits this with having been instrumental in achieving the grant for Urban Originals.

“As a result of this financial assistance Urban Originals has been able to grow its International customer base to include big-name stores such as Fred Segal, Kitson, ASOS and Urban Outfitters.”

With the EDMG assistance international growth has been able to be achieved without negatively impacting the brand’s local growth. Now Cates is in discussions with major distributors in the US and is signing licensing deals for the States, Japan and the United Kingdom which she anticipates will double her turnover in the next year.